Bach settled in Leipzig at the age of thirty-eight. He remained there
the rest of his life. True, he came and went, and he made journeys of
one sort or another, but they were never far distant or protracted.
In Leipzig he created his grandest, his most colossal, and also his
profoundest and subtlest works. His duties were incredibly numerous
and often heart-breakingly heavy. He was responsible, it has been
said, “to all and to none.” Again and again he had the rector of
the St. Thomas School, the city council, the church Consistory, and
yet others about his ears. He had to look after the musical services
in four churches, two of them the most important in the town. Under
exasperating conditions he had to teach turbulent and ruffianly pupils.
He had to combat official ill will and intrigue. For the performances
he was obliged to conduct he had vocal and instrumental forces that
strike us as laughably inadequate and were in numberless cases grossly
unskilled. The demands on his physical and spiritual strength must
have been appalling. Yet Bach appears to have had the resources and
the resistance of a giant. We know that over and again his temper, his
obstinate nature and inborn pugnacity were tried to the uttermost. But
in the face of all irritations he was earning enough, his home life was
comfortable, he met and entertained artists, he had the satisfaction
of knowing that his sons could enjoy the educational advantages of
Leipzig, and he gradually gathered about him a company of greatly
gifted young students and devoted disciples.
In the course of years he shifted some of his most unsympathetic duties
to other shoulders. How he could otherwise have written the gigantic
amount of music he did is an unanswerable question. For consider: he
came to Leipzig the composer of about thirty church cantatas. When he
died in 1750 he had produced there 265 more. Of this staggering total
(295) 202 have come down to us. As if this were not enough (these
cantatas, incidentally, were week-to-week obligations), his years at
Leipzig account for many secular cantatas, six motets, five masses
(including the titanic one in B minor), the Passions according to
St. John and St. Matthew (not to mention lost ones), the _Christmas
Oratorio_, the resplendent _Magnificat_, the _Easter_ and _Ascension_
oratorios, besides clavier works like the _Italian Concerto_, the
_Goldberg Variations_, the second book of the _Well-Tempered Clavier_,
and an incredible mass of other things.
The rector of St. Thomas’ School during Bach’s first years in Leipzig
was Johann Heinrich Ernesti, with whom Bach’s relations were cordial
enough, though the rector was a slipshod disciplinarian. Matters
remained pleasant enough under Johann Gesner, but presently the latter
left St. Thomas to assume a more profitable post at Göttingen. His
successor, Johann August Ernesti, quickly proceeded to stroke Bach’s
fur the wrong way by declaring that altogether too much attention was
given to the study of music. “So you want to be a pot-house fiddler,”
he used to say to youths he found practising the violin. It was only
a question of time when the surly new rector and the combustible Bach
would come into collision.
What has been called the “battle of the Prefects” was long drawn out
and bitter. The details need not detain us. Trouble was intensified
by the appointment to a responsible position of a person named
Krause, whom Bach had angrily described as “ein liederlicher Hund”
(“a dissolute dog”). Things went from bad to worse. Bach accused the
rector of usurping his functions. He wrote long, circumstantial letters
setting forth his case to “their Magnificences,” the Burgomaster, the
civic council, and other outstanding authorities. “Their Magnificences”
replied with legalistic hair-splittings and things grew so violent
that Bach in one case undertook to drive Krause from the choir loft.
The lengthy series of undignified squabbles was finally brought to an
end by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, Saxony, “etc., etc., etc.”
(to use Bach’s own designation). We are not certain that the composer
obtained the satisfaction he demanded, but everyone seems to have tired
of the interminable quarrel and was relieved to see it peter out.
Meanwhile, Bach had other worries and vexations. One of his sons,
Gottfried Bernhard, proved as unstable as did Wilhelm Friedemann in a
later day, but died before his financial misdeeds had ended in his open
disgrace. Then the composer was made the target of attacks by a certain
minor musician, one Scheibe, who criticized his works for what he
called their “complexity and overelaboration.” Bach immortalized the
fellow by satirizing him in the secular cantata, “Phoebus and Pan,”
where Scheibe appears as the ignoramus Midas, adorned with a pair of
ass’s ears!
[Illustration: Bach performing at the organ of the Potsdam
garrison-church. In the center is Frederick the Great, at whose request
Bach played the organs in several of Potsdam’s leading churches.]
[Illustration: Bach accompanying his musically gifted second wife—for
whom he wrote some of his most inspired arias—in an informal recital
at their Leipzig home.]
In 1736 Augustus the Strong conferred upon Bach the title of Court
Composer. The patent of Bach’s dignity was committed to the Russian
envoy in Dresden, Carl Freiherr von Keyserling. He was a sufferer
from chronic insomnia and it is to this circumstance that we owe one
of Bach’s supreme works for the clavier—the so-called _Goldberg
Variations_. To ease the torment of sleepless nights the Count had in
his service a gifted clavecinist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a pupil
of Bach’s. While Bach was in the midst of his troubles with Ernesti,
Keyserling commissioned him to write Goldberg “something soothing” to
divert his wakefulness. Bach took a Sarabande melody he had copied into
his wife’s _Notenbuch_ and used it as the basis of thirty variations.
So delighted was Keyserling that he never wearied of listening to
Goldberg play them and actually referred to them as “my Variations.”
The Count, paradoxically enough, now had every reason to remain awake
and enjoy the never-ending ingenuity and luxuriant fancy of these
variations and the lively _Quodlibet_ toward the close, which recalls
those boisterous medleys the Bach family of old used to improvise
at its reunions. It is pleasant to record that Keyserling paid Bach
liberally for “his” _Variations_.